You're the bee's knees but so am I
Let's spend six hours making lasagne, and a boy will press a cassette tape in to my hands while telling me which track is his favourite song, and we'll find somewhere to eat alone in New York City.
You’re the bee’s knees but so am I
In this edition of All The Songs, we’ll think about Morrissey on a Saturday morning in September. We’ll drink a Spanish white wine that tastes like a day at the beach. Let's spend six hours making lasagne, and a boy will press a cassette tape in to my hands while telling me which track is his favourite song, and we'll find somewhere to eat alone in New York City.
Listening
After I’d drunk two cups of black coffee and eaten a breakfast of white rice, grilled salmon and an umeboshi that was warmed through to its pip from being pushed down in to the hot rice, this morning I stretched out in my backyard and listened to The Smiths. We are blessed today with one of Wellington’s good ones: the sun is bright, the wind is stilled to the softest breeze and though it is still cold, being outdoors is pleasant.
The debut, self-titled album from The Smiths belongs for me to a time when I was in my early twenties. I lived alone in a flat that was a quarter of a big old villa. It was one of the worst houses on one of Auckland’s best streets. The balcony was rotting - my high heels crunched clean through the wood more than once - but I could see the ocean and the Harbour Bridge from a chair placed beside my front door. I’d often sit out there on weekend mornings when the sun was like this, like it is here in Wellington today, but back then I was inevitably hungover because I was in my early 20s. I would have been drinking black coffee made in the same stovetop pot I used this morning and smoking hand rolled cigarettes, doing nothing but looking out at the water and listening to The Smiths. It was relaxing. It was meditative. We didn’t have social media yet - except for MySpace - and I’d have bought the big weekend newspaper to read. I listened to this album a lot back then, but that’s an instalment of Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them for another day.
Today I was asking myself if I want to go see Morrissey perform in Auckland in December. I’ll already be up that week for another show - Alvvays playing at The Powerstation - so I could easily go up a couple nights sooner to also see the Morrissey show. Online sets lists inform me he plays mostly solo songs these days but with a few classics from The Smiths thrown in. Partway through the second song, ‘You’ve Got Everything Now’, I had my answer. Of course I want to see Morrissey at least once in my life, his personal politics aside. Most of the solo material will mean nothing to me but seeing him sing ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ - the B-side found collected on Hatful of Hollow that he’s playing regularly these days - for few short minutes will be worth the journey, the expense and the time.
Reading
Brigitta Olubas’s 564 page biography of the Australian author Shirley Hazzard uses extracts from letters and diaries to paint a rich picture of the woman and the writer in her. ‘Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life’ describes how Hazzard moved frequently in her youth. She experienced Australia, Hong Kong, New York and Wellington as a young woman.
The biography shows how the author blurred the truth of her life. She didn’t like to admit to being Australian, she’d airily describe having lived all over the world sooner than she would admit having been raised mostly in Sydney. She loved Italy and preferred to associate herself with places there where she would write in the summer than where she’d actually grown up. It is confronting to read how she had affairs with married men as a young woman seemingly without regret. She fell in love dramatically, writing in her diary about her affairs with “anxious desperation, a ripple of despair”. She was a young woman in the 1950s and she took everything she could from that world, even bites out of someone else’s husband.
Her talent was immense and she published frequently in The New Yorker. She hob-nobbed with literary elite including Graham Greene, who she became close to. Her books are beloved and I’m ashamed to say I haven’t read her most well-known novels The Great Fire or Transit of Venus, just short stories and this biography about her. Those two classics are next on my reading list.
A fun fact for my fellow Wellingtonians is that she lived at 29 Thompson Street in Mount Cook for a period, yet there is no plaque.
Watching
I’ve been recovering from a cold and the greatest treatment for this lingering illness was spending two whole days watching Only Murders In The Building, taking frequent breaks for naps (and pain relief, and lemon honey ginger drinks). It centres on an apartment building on the Upper West Side, something like The Dakota but fictional. Three of its residents - played by Selena Gomez and her two older pals Steve Martin and Martin Short - start a podcast about a murder. It’s cozy murder, not scary murder. There is no nightmare material here.
The sweetness of the show is in the friendship that develops between the unlikely trio. They team up season after season (there are three so far) to resolve surprisingly complex plots. I’d forgotten half the detail of season one’s murder by the time I tuned in to the second season. It is an eventful show but still suitably gentle for someone unwell.
Cooking
Week after week, I’ve been trying to carve out a whole day to make Charlotte Ree’s six hour lasagne from her memoir Heartbake. (She shared the recipe with Sydney Morning Herald, if you want to try it.) You need a whole day in the house to stir it and keep an eye on the stove. Last weekend that time finally came.
I’m an anxious and infrequent meat-eater (one thing Morrissey was right about is that meat is murder), because I was raised vegetarian. It doesn’t compute for me that a cow is a food. And yet, from time to time, I’ll be exposed to a meaty recipe and crave it in the way you can taste something just by reading about it on the page. The way Charlotte Ree described perfecting her lasagne recipe painstakingly over a long period of time challenged me to try it for myself.
Because of my guilt and ethics, I insisted we get the best meat around - pork and beef mince from Cameron Harrison, an award-winning local butcher. The smell of the meat sauce filled our home. With the red wine stirred through, with the carrots and celery and onion and out-of-season zucchini and tinned tomatoes, it wasn’t too, you know, meaty.
I made the lasagne dough from scratch. The meat sauce was on the stove for the full six hours, then layered with the pasta and a béchamel and baked in the oven for 45 minutes. The portion the recipe made was gigantic. I kept about a quarter of it leftover because it wouldn’t fit in my largest baking dish, and even then it made us eight portions. The celery had completely broken down in the cooking time. The sauce was rich and tasty. It was a wonderful winter treat.
Drinking
My partner and I attended the Language Of Wine class at Wine Sentience in August, something that appealed to me because I’ve grown interested in natural wine but don’t yet have the words to explain what I like.
The class walked us through twenty different wines over two nights of tasting. The most memorable wine for me was the Arregi Txakoli 2021 - Getariako Txakolina, Basque, Spain. It is limey and bright and tastes like it is made from grapes that were grown near the ocean, because it was. It tastes positively coastal and it was such a joy in the class to piece together what that taste is like, to start to understand why a taste can be described that way.
The class gave me a little more confidence to identify flavours myself. It will take practice and I will continue to drink thoughtfully as I understand more about my own palate over time.
This particular wine inspired me to host a mid-winter dinner with the theme of summer, because its taste brought the coast so present, but I couldn’t find it anywhere to buy locally. It can be ordered online though, so my dinner party plans are proceeding.
Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them
For this memoir-by-playlist project, I write 500 words on my memories of a song. These vignettes offer a glimpse in to the rich and varied emotions we all experience in our lifetimes through showing a brief slice of my life at a particular time, in how I relate to a certain song. What the music brings up might be shallow or it could be intense. The memory may be joyful or thick with sorrow, a reflection on pleasure or a heavy exploration of fear. Whatever emotions a song dredges up from the spectrum of human feeling, they are true.
I remember snippets alongside songs. This is the soundtrack to my life. Let me be clear: Everyone I’ve Ever Loved & All The Songs That Remind Me Of Them is not a curated selection of the coolest songs I want to associate myself with. Some of them are my jam, others are trashy and catchy - all manner of music has been part of my life.
This project invites the reader to consider, where does this song take you? What does it remind you of? Where were you in your life when you last listened to this track?
‘Longview’ by Green Day
There is a new guy in my class and I don’t understand why, but I kind of can’t breathe around him. We are in our final year of primary school, in the room closest to the school gates. As we age up, our classrooms get nearer to the exit we’ll eventually leave permanently.
This boy has brown hair cut in to the curtain-style floppy hair that will become iconic. The hair is styled to fall between the temples and the cheekbones, usually with a centre parting, but it can be tossed - for it is floppy - to a casual side parting. This sweep of the hand can be done for emphasis during conversation. The gesture can demonstrate thinking.
It it Jared Leto hair, Leonardo DiCaprio hair, Rider Strong hair, it is three of the five members of boy band Take That hair. I’ve been socialised by pop culture to think this boy is a dreamboat because of the way he wears his hair but oh boy, he really is.
When he talks to me, I get a little giddy. His presence is thrilling. One day I have gathered my handouts from the teacher at the front of the class for our lesson and I sit next to him with my stack of papers. Oh, you got the handouts, thanks Jazial, he says, taking the papers I’d intended for myself. He seems so pleased, grinning broadly, happy with me. I mutter that it’s no problem. I want him to have everything. I would fetch papers for him on purpose, all day, if he wanted me to.
We can’t stop talking to each other and I’m honoured he enjoys my company. He tells me Green Day are, like, his band. I immediately inform him that I love them too.
In the video for Longview, the lead singer sits on a brown sofa in a cramped dirty living room, listlessly flipping TV stations, and he sings with his mouth right against the mic. His hair is floppy too but dyed green and thick with wax, a pop punk version of Hot Guy Hair. I won’t realise it’s about masturbation until many years later but the malaise in the words is relatable. I’m sick of all the same old shit too.
You can borrow my tape, the boy tells me. The Dookie cassette comes with strict instructions that I can have it for two nights. I’ll have to move schools again when mum drags me from Onehunga to Birkdale partway through the final primary year, so this exchange is the furthest our relationship will go.
In my room, I examine the liner notes while Longview plays. The playful baseline is bouncy and taunting, building up to the satisfying guitar tantrum and drum explosion of the chorus. Radically, there is swearing in the song. It was so bold of him to declare this his favourite song and it sets the tone for how flirting will work for the rest of my life: we talk about music.
‘Lights Out’ by Santigold
I wander towards Washington Square Park, then back towards Spring Street. Past Bleecker and Wooster streets. There, on Spring, is the Dominique Ansell bakery I ate at last time. Someone has written in chalk ’NEW YORK ROMANTIC’ on a black painted storefront, below the window where mannequins pose in expensive clothes. I take photo of the graffiti and post it to Instagram: ‘Self portrait on Spring Street’.
A tapas restaurant called Boqueria lures me. I’m going to ask for a table for one, I think, a rush of confidence swelling up in my chest. I’ll full of New York swagger. There is New York comfort inside my own skin.
The restaurant is alive with people. I’m seated at a small round table, one of many pushed up against a cushioned banquette that runs along the entire wall. I take off my leather jacket, order a glass of red wine and delight over each vegetarian item on the menu. Sautéed spinach, garbanzos, pine nuts, garlic and golden raisins! Gem lettuce, romesco, Idiazabal cheese, mint and caramelised hazelnuts!
I order the Escalivada - fire roasted eggplant, red pepper, onion, labne, fresh herbs and olive oil with flatbread - and patatas bravas crispy potatoes served with salsa brava and roasted garlic aioli.
The Santigold song ‘Lights Out’ comes on. It’s a peppy, indie electronic song that more than one reviewer compared to The Cars. My phone is face down on the table. I pay close attention to the song, watching the staff bustle about and observing couples making eye contact as they talk animatedly. I don’t feel alone, around so many people who are together enjoying each other’s company.
I eat slowly, feeling the depth and the edges of all the pleasure this scene brings me. The server stops by, noting the wine glass has been drained, and asks if I want another. I say no as a reflex - I always do that, whether it’s colleagues passing out homebaked cookies or hospitality professionals asking if I would like more of anything. I’m enjoying this. I want more of all of it. I attract the server’s attention back and say actually, yes, I would like another glass please. They smile. They don’t say no or tell me I’m greedy or that I look lonely and shouldn’t be taking up space in their lovely restaurant. I’m welcome here. I enjoy the second glass of wine as much as the first. I dredge the flatbread through the eggplant dip, chew each mouthful leisurely and pause before reaching for more food.
My limbs have stretched out. I feel filled with ease. I wonder how I can make this feeling stay, if it’s possible to get this feeling at home in my normal life where I just get up and go to work and stuff. I wonder if it is possible to find this feeling inside myself, the way I imagine people who grew up safely are able to feel as second nature. They probably don’t even think about it.